Bruce Springsteen's career has spanned 40 years, influencing a couple generations of future singer-songwriters and bands. But perhaps the greatest testament to the Boss is not the amount of bands he's inspired but the many different types -- as this list demonstrates, Springsteen has influenced postpunk, alternative rock, roots-rockers, hair-metal and even a soft-spoken English troubadour.
Arcade Fire
Photo courtesy Merge Records.One of the 21st century's first proudly anthemic bands, Arcade Fire proved to be indie-rock heroes on 2007's
Neon Bible. Along the way, they also hooked up with the Boss, appearing in concert together and covering each other's songs. Both Arcade Fire and Springsteen have an ability to write high-quality stadium songs that whip their fans into a frenzy without settling for lowest-common-denominator gimmicks. Plus, Arcade Fire are renowned for their high-energy shows, drawing comparisons to Springsteen's marathon gigs with the E Street Band.
Badly Drawn Boy
Photo courtesy Beggars Banquet.Damon Gough, better known as Badly Drawn Boy, is a soft-spoken English singer-songwriter who pens sensitive relationship tunes. But one of his favorite artists is Bruce Springsteen? That might seem like an odd musical idol for an artist who specializes in delicate, layered chamber pop, but on albums like 2000's
The Hour of Bewilderbeast, Gough channels the nervous heartbreak of Springsteen's seminal relationship album
Tunnel of Love.
Bon Jovi
Photo courtesy Mercury.Hailing from Springsteen's home state of New Jersey, Jon Bon Jovi adapted Bruce's stadium-worthy romantic messages for the hair-metal craze that became popular at the end of the 1980s.
Bon Jovi hits like "Livin' on a Prayer" sounded like they were populated by the same wide-eyed dreamers that Springsteen sang about on
Born to Run, and the songs' jukebox immediacy made Bon Jovi beloved by regular folks everywhere.
Drive-By Truckers
Photo courtesy ATO.The Georgia sextet Drive-By Truckers fuse Southern rock and alt-country to tell stories about regular people dealing with tough times. Like Springsteen, this band use their ordinary protagonists to discuss larger social ills: alcoholism, broken homes, suicide, infidelity, war. On their 2010 album, The Big To-Do, DBT demonstrate that despairing subject matter can still be rousing if you put enough passion and volume into it.
Foo Fighters
Photo courtesy RCA.Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl teamed up with Bruce Springsteen (and Elvis Costello) at the 2003 Grammys to perform during a tribute to the Clash's Joe Strummer, but beyond their love of a punk pioneer, Grohl and Springsteen share an everyman quality that is part of their appeal. As with Springsteen, there's something amazingly ordinary about Grohl's appearance and demeanor -- but rather than making these artists seem anonymous, this regular-Joe persona has given their heartfelt songs an undeniable ring of authenticity.
The Gaslight Anthem
Photo courtesy SideOneDummy.It's not just the fact that the Gaslight Anthem hail from New Jersey why they get compared to the Boss. Like Springsteen's early records, this punk-influenced quartet sing about big-city dreams with a yearning spirit that's set against music that's full of surging resilience. And on 2010's American Slang, they turned that romanticism into taut, anthem-ready rock that helped the indie band find a larger audience.
The Hold Steady
Photo courtesy Vagrant Records.For
Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn, the whole world resembles the bar-band beauty of Springsteen's '70s albums, particularly
Born to Run's piano-soaked anthems. On
Boys and Girls in America, the Minneapolis/Brooklyn rockers explored the crummy love lives and dead-end jobs of small-town characters who, to paraphrase a line from the Boss, still had romantic dreams in their head.
The Killers
Photo courtesy Island.When
the Killers set about recording the follow-up to their successful debut,
Hot Fuss, these Las Vegas postpunk rockers set their sights on the Jersey shore. 2006's
Sam's Town could have been renamed
Springsteen's Town -- the band drew from the sweeping, soaring impulses of Bruce's best material, transplanting his vision of '70s burnouts to turn-of-the-century Sin City kids fumbling to make love last. They toned down the Springsteen influences on their next album,
Day & Age.
Kings of Leon
Photo courtesy RCA.Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill shares with Bruce Springsteen a willingness to explore his own failings in songs that feel personal but never whiny or melodramatic. In rock mode, Springsteen has mostly stayed true to classic rock 'n' roll traditions, but in later years, he's explored more nuanced sounds on
Magic and
The Rising. In the same way, Kings of Leon have evolved from '70s-style classic rockers to the craftsmen of edgier albums like 2008's
Only by the Night.
John Mellencamp
Photo courtesy Island.During his rise in the 1980s,
John Mellencamp was often dismissed as little more than a Midwestern response to Springsteen's New Jersey aesthetic. But this Indiana roots-rocker has demonstrated over a 30-year career, and particularly on 1985's
Scarecrow, that he is one of the most faithful observers of the American dream and the many ways it has failed to materialize for a lot of hard-working folks. Like Springsteen, Mellencamp has shifted back and forth from rock to folk in his songwriting to speak truth to power.
